Jamie L. Shenk is a political sociologist interested in the social effects of armed conflict and local participation with a regional focus on Latin America. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. She holds a PhD in Sociology and a MSc in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in History from Princeton University with certificates in Latin American Studies and Global Health. 

Her current research project focuses on the lingering effects of armed conflict on environmental mobilization, using Colombia as a case study. She examines how armed conflict influences communities’ repertoires of contention in contests large-scale mining and oil projects in Colombia. Her research employs a mixed-methods approach, leveraging quantitative analysis of an original dataset she constructed of popular mobilizations in Colombia and qualitative data (semi-structured interviews and participant observation) collected during fieldwork in-country.

She is particularly interested in the policy implications of her research. From 2021-2022, she was the head of the Oxford group of Agora, a grassroots foreign policy think tank and member of the Open Think Tank Network. She was the 2018 Latin America Fellow for Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. Her analyses have been published in The Diplomat (with Michael Kugelman), Americas Quarterly (with Cynthia Arnson), Fair Observer, and The New Atlanticist, among other outlets.